How to Succeed As a First-Time UX Manager

“The skills that make
you successful as an individual contributor are not the same skills you need as a leader.”

In my last column, I suggested that being a manager of UX is
no better—and no worse—than being a great designer or user researcher, but the roles are very different. In fact, as the book The First 90 Days [1] points out, the skills that make you successful as an individual contributor are not the same skills you need as a leader.

Still, I was glad to see that a couple of people who talked
with me after reading my column are being offered the opportunity to move into
management roles and have decided to take the plunge. They asked me how they
could make this transition a positive experience for them, their teams, and
their companies. They were asking the right questions. This column discusses
what attributes can help someone become a successful first-time UX
manager—though these attributes are foundational elements for all managers.

Before we dive in, please realize that this column cries out
for the need to describe the differences between management and leadership. But
to keep this article from becoming a treatise, I hope you’ll bear with me as I
focus narrowly on how to survive and thrive as a first-time manager. I’ll take
up leadership in my next column.

Holy Cow, Now What?

“The skills that probably got you into a
management role can guarantee your failure once you move into that role.”

Becoming a manager can feel like the best choice you’ve ever
made—like you’ve finally found your home and are doing what you were always
meant to do. That’s how I feel about leading UX teams now. I thrive on it. The
fact is, though, I certainly did not feel that way early on in my management career. I felt well out of my depth.
While I survived the experience, my team put me on notice! Most new managers
thought becoming a manager would feel exhilarating and refreshing—even as they
began to feel lost in a hostile third-world country without a way out. Among
the first-time managers with whom I’ve spoken, only those who managed just one
or two people felt their first management role was what they expected.

The irony is: The skills that probably got you into a
management role can guarantee your failure once you move into that role. As a
designer or user researcher, your success depended much more on your personal
expertise, focused execution, and ability to individually achieve goals. As a
manager, your job is not to do the
work, but to bring out the best in your team. You need to set your team’s
direction so they’re working on the right priorities, make sure team members
work together well and play their positions, and in the end, ensure they produce
market-changing designs. Trust me: Your career as an individual contributor
prepared you only very little for management. You have more to learn than you
think you do! (Isn’t that true for all of us, though?)

As you move higher up the management chain, you’ll do more
coaching and progressively less actual design or research. While you focused on
being a great designer or researcher before, now you need to learn to coach. In
fact, you’ll need to increase your coaching skills as you become a more senior
leader. At each step, as your management career progresses, you’ll increase
your scope of influence, which means there will be less time available for you
to perform individual contributor tasks. Some people never want to stop
performing the actual design or research. That’s fine. You just can’t do it
vicariously through your employees. That is, you can’t try to do their jobs for
them, or you’ll alienate them.

“For the discipline of user experience to continue becoming more influential, UX leaders need to create a working environment that
stimulates not just good, but great design.”

I believe, to a great extent, our first management
experiences stay with us forever. The goal is to make your first experience a
success and build on that success. Unfortunately, for many, their first
experiences are far less successful. These difficult experiences also stay with
and define us—hopefully for the better, but through hardships, which leave
scars, rather than success.

For the discipline of user experience to continue becoming
more influential, UX leaders need to create a working environment that
stimulates not just good, but great design. We need to show that design can differentiate products and create a competitive advantage. Design can prevent products from becoming commodities,
by making sure they are the most useful, desirable, and socially valuable
products anywhere. Is this a high bar? Absolutely! That is what great managers
can do. Hopefully, this column will help you achieve such results!

Common Misconceptions

“It’s the leader’s job to assemble the best team possible and facilitate the team’s finding, aligning
with, and driving the best ideas to realization.”

Over the years, I’ve mentored a number of individual
contributors who were transitioning into management roles. At first, they felt
becoming a manager was proof they had the best ideas and could now drive their own
personal agendas. It may seem ironic, but this attitude is a sure path to
failure. Unlike being the superstar researcher or designer, the job of a leader
is not to have the best ideas.
Instead, it’s the leader’s job to assemble the best team possible and facilitate the team’s finding, aligning
with, and driving the best ideas to realization. Many new managers feel being
the manager means they can tell their employees what to do, and they’ll just do
it. If only it were that easy.

I’m going to talk about several misconceptions new managers
hold and show how new managers need to behave very differently from how they
expected. You may find it ironic that, in order to demonstrate you are a strong
and successful leader, you must ask instead of telling and coach instead of
dictating. You have to let people find their own way to success, even though
it’s different from how you would do it. It may feel unnatural, but you have to
let employees fail, even when you feel a desperate need to succeed.

Part of your role is to hire the best talent and leverage
their skills and knowledge. In fact, the book Good to Great [2] suggests the best companies and groups always get
the right talent on board first, then define their direction. If you’re going
to hire the best talent, don’t you want your employees to perform at their
best? Your role, then, is less about direct execution and more about getting
your individual contributors to produce the best work of their careers.

Yes, You Must Build Trust

“Rather than telling your employees how to succeed, you need to learn to solicit their input to determine the best path and agree on it, then let them execute on it.”

Of course, new employees have to earn the trust of their
leaders by delivering great results. In the same way, as a leader, you don’t
automatically have the trust of your employees. Like in any relationship, you
have to build that trust. How do you build trust? Not by being the smartest
person in the room. Certainly, you have to have a strong vision, and you have
to show you are a strong, capable leader. But the way you do this is very
different from how you demonstrated you were a kick-ass individual contributor.

Rather than telling your employees how to succeed, you need
to learn to solicit their input to determine the best path and agree on it, then
let them execute on it. You need to become a great facilitator. Look: Your
employees want to impress you. They want opportunities to hit the ball out of
the park—just like you. Most of us—whether we’re working in corporations or
small firms—are looking to grow. We want our leaders to recognize our talents,
promote us, and give us bigger paychecks—okay, most of us. When our bosses give
us room to be successful, coach us toward greater success, recognize our great
contributions, and help remove barriers, we perform better and appreciate their leadership. As a leader, you must give your
employees these opportunities.

And as a leader, you also have to defend great ideas that
may, at first glance, seem wacky, defend great designers who don’t sell
themselves well, and in general, demonstrate managerial courage. When you
advocate for your team, they’ll advocate for you. In fact, you’ll find there are
many ways of building trust, and this will be a theme throughout the rest of
this column.

Ask, Don’t Tell; Coach, Don’t Dictate; and Let ’em Fail

“Your goal is to help generate a virtuous cycle, where the team executes well, you recognize the contributions of team members, and
they continue to grow in their ability to make a positive impact.”

In terms of building trust, many new managers think: “I was
given the power, so my job is to tell my team what to do, and they have to
listen.” Again, this is a sure-fire way to lose control of your team and
prevent them from aligning with goals and generating tangible value. With such a mind set,
managers fall into a vicious cycle of correcting and criticizing people who are
highly competent. To these employees, such managers begin to seem like
totalitarian dictators. Your goal is to help generate a virtuous cycle, where
the team executes well, you recognize the contributions of team members, and
they continue to grow in their ability to make a positive impact.

Look, from an employee’s perspective, at taking direction
from a totalitarian boss: “He hired me because I’m good at what I do, and yet
he’s dictating how I do the job—and he’s wrong, darn it!” Do you think telling
an expert designer how to do her job makes her feel valued and empowered? Does
it make her feel as though you trust her skills? Of course, it doesn’t. So, how
do we build trust? I’ll get into that.

Don’t get me wrong: You do need to offer your guidance. You
were put into your role as manager because you were successful as a user researcher
or designer. The point, though, is that you have to learn to facilitate and guide
and make your team members feel excited about making their own contributions rather
than telling them exactly what to do.

It’s sad to say that I have worked not only with new
managers, but also with peers—and a boss or two—who did not understand the
importance of building trust among their employees. One such peer—we’ll call
him Paul—told me point blank: “I don’t care what my employees think.” How did
Paul do? In my last column, I pointed out that bad managers eventually get
found out. Paul certainly did. Everyone in the organization talked about him.
Employees came to me daily looking for help. I encouraged my boss to define
leadership competencies to measure us by—me included—and he did. Within a
month, this manager “left the organization.” In one way, we were fortunate.
Most poor leaders are not so blatant. Whether you are a new or an established
manager, spend the time building trust. It will pay off. Seeing a team gel,
execute at a high level, and weather hard times without difficulty is—for me—a
joy to observe. That’s when I know I’m doing the right thing.

Get Your Entire Team in the Game

“Listening to your team is essential. You hire the best designers and researchers in the world, and you need to get their minds in the
game.”

Listening to your team is essential. You hire the best
designers and researchers in the world, and you need to get their minds in the
game. Good to Great articulates this
well. The book identified—among other things—the leadership attributes that
result in the most successful companies and teams in the world. The first is to
hire the most talented employees, then to
define direction. Using a term from the book Winning [3] by Jack Welch, you truly need to get every mind in the
game. Provide direction to your team’s discussions, provide the appropriate
structure, pull in the right people at the right time, and help synthesize
different ideas. You are not there to be the one who just dictates the team’s appropriate direction.

Not only do you need your team’s expertise—their minds—you
also need their hearts. You need them to emotionally buy into the direction you
establish. There’s nothing more difficult than trying to drive a team in a
direction they do not understand and have not bought into emotionally.

Demonstrate Strength by Soliciting Input

“You have to be confident in yourself, show you can make hard decisions rapidly, and solve very real problems, enabling your team to succeed.”

It’s worth taking a minute to clarify one key point: I am
not suggesting you become wimpy or indecisive. Quite the contrary. As
suggested in the book Great Boss, Dead
Boss [4]—an unfortunate title, but a great book—people intuitively follow
strong, capable leaders, not those
who vacillate. You have to be confident in yourself, show you can make hard
decisions rapidly, and solve very real problems, enabling your team to succeed.
For example, you might need to fight for increased headcount or outside
consulting dollars, get UX an equal voice with other organizations, or simply
drive process improvements. You need to get your team members focused on
objectives and be very crisp in your expectations.

In no case, though, should confidence equate to arrogance.
The most confident leaders do not need to constantly prove how much they know.
The book Lions Don’t Need to Roar [5]
articulates this principle well. You can show your confidence by presenting a
strong, clear vision for the future and asking others for help in defining how
you as a team can realize that vision. I once helped one of my teams handle a
challenging time by making a statement something like this: “I am deeply proud of
some of the successes this team has had over the past year. At the same time, I
recently talked with some of our stakeholders, who have told us we’re not
executing at the level they’ve come to expect from us. Before I make a decision
about changes we will make to increase our impact, I’d like us, as a team, to
be brutally honest about our challenges and work together to define possible
solutions.”

Instead of deciding on a solution that very day, I
recognized that the team needed discussions to evolve over several weeks. In
the end, I communicated to the company that we needed to function like
entrepreneurs on every project and turned the team into an internal
consultancy. This UX team had to bid on jobs within our company and be
competitive with external design firms such as IDEO and Frog Design. In the
end, it was this organizational structure that made my team responsible for
driving $2 billion in revenue. This could never have happened without the
following events occurring:

I expressed my trust in the team’s ability to identify and solve our challenges.

I made sure we engaged every brain in our talks about challenges and
opportunities.

The team synthesized the input and discussed possible directions.

I decided on the team’s direction, then praised the team for their courage in
informing such a creative direction. Really, it’s not easy to do things
differently.

The team understood the reasons behind the change and felt emotionally bought into
an exciting new direction.

My point here: I was not passive and did not ask others to define our team’s direction. I was
responsible for that. I also did not make decisions by committee. I listened
and made the decisions myself, and everyone knew why I had made the decisions I
did, and how they had contributed to the direction. But I made sure to include the
team in the dialogue and gave credit to the team for their insights. I learned
a great deal from the discussion, and working through our challenges helped us
bond more strongly as a team.

Set Clear Expectations

“It is amazing how leveraging your team in defining explicit competencies and expectations helps the team normalize itself.”

You do have to help employees understand what you expect of
them. Generally, it’s okay to express these as your expectations. But better
yet, ask the entire team for help defining success. Solicit their dreams and
goals. What do they want to see happen for the group? Allow them to think big.
Then, help them to identify the employee characteristics—competencies,
professional practices, and values—that define the ideal employee.

It is amazing how leveraging your team in defining explicit
competencies and expectations helps the team normalize itself. Of course, these
competencies give you specific areas in which you can appraise your employees.
And you should establish a coaching plan, then coach individuals against these
competencies.

Exercises in defining a team’s direction create a bond among
members of the team. Leveraging the group’s insights through structured
brainstorming helps the team gel. Every team has its own personality, and you
need to let your team find its unique way of interacting. Once all of your team
members are contributing at a high level—once they show they trust one another
and give you their very best with the intent of helping the team succeed—you
have a team that can endure hardship and thrive.

More importantly, when each member of your team understands
and buys into the practices the team has identified, they can help one another
normalize their practices. In one case, I had a team that agreed it had to stop
complaining about product managers. They agreed that, any time they heard
someone complaining about a PM, they would suggest the complainer go hold a
stakeholder interview with the PM with whom he was having trouble. Or, if they
saw unhealthy argument within the team, they would point out that our
competition was external, not internal, and we needed to engage in a discovery session to work through
challenges.

Stop Being the Smartest Person in the Room

“Asking targeted questions to facilitate a discussion and elicit understanding from your team makes team members respect you a great deal more.”

One of the most difficult habits to break for great
designers and researchers is being the smartest person in the room. Even if you
are, asking targeted questions to facilitate a discussion and elicit
understanding from your team makes team members respect you a great deal more.
And in doing so, you are in a position to praise them for their good work. It
becomes that virtuous cycle: You give them room, they do well, you praise
them—and in the end, they see you as a good leader. Amazing!

I’ve known a number of designers and researchers who thought
becoming a manager would give them the credibility they’d always wanted—to make
people listen to them. They’re looking for respect. Therefore, they attempt to
impart their wisdom to both individuals and the larger team. This is one
principle virtually all management books agree on: The best leaders—as measured by objective performance—are truly
humble, not arrogant. Jack Welch points out in Winning that, even when
he was CEO of GE, the world’s largest corporation, he consciously made the
effort not to appear to be the smartest person in the room. Even if he was, he let others feel as if they
were. Why? He wanted them to contribute, and they would not if Jack was always
there to upstage them or even just give them the answer.

The fact is: Unless you can participate in every discussion
and design session, you need to coach your individual contributors to become
more independent and able to solve problems more and more independently. The
reality, though, is that even if your path to success has, in fact, been highly
effective, your employees might find an even better way of doing things.
Because I try to hire people who are much smarter than I am—and there’s always
someone who’s better than you—my reports often help redefine goals and find
superior ways to success. If we, as managers, try to control our employees, we
not only diminish trust, we also stifle potential creativity and innovation.

Start Giving the Credit To Your Team

Even if you did come up with a great idea, give the credit
to your team—especially when you’re in the trust-building phase. The ironic thing
is, when you give others credit, you set them up for future success, and you
receive even more respect. It takes nothing away from you, and sets you up as a
leader in the eyes of others. What it shows is that you are an emotionally
mature leader who values your employees and can direct a team to produce
results. And it shows your team you’ll go to bat for them. It increases their
loyalty, their willingness to support you—which you really do need—and their
willingness to contribute in the future.

Become a Great Coach—Help Your Employees Grow

“I like to set up a specific coaching plan and work toward it every month—setting up regular sessions and helping my reports grow.”

One of the best coaching experiences I’ve ever had was when
I delivered a presentation to an executive. He listened, asked questions, and
gave me feedback on what I did well. Then, instead of criticizing me, he said,
“You did a great job. Would you be open to me coaching you in a few areas?”
Once he got my agreement, he helped me immeasurably. He pointed out that senior
leaders need me to get right to the point, help them understand what needs to
be done, how it will benefit them, what it will cost if we do not do it, and
produce an implementation plan. They also want you to present alternatives, to
show you’re not unduly attached to one idea and have thought through your
options. His doing this helped me deliver better presentations. More than this,
it made me feel that he cared, and it built a loyalty that inspired me to
double and triple my efforts. The result? He got credit for $1 billion in
revenue increases for his line of business, and I got a promotion to a senior
leadership role. None of this would have happened had he not suggested he
trusted me through his willingness to coach me.

I think too many of us are afraid to truly coach today, and
even I forget to do it often enough. But every time I have offered coaching in
the spirit of promoting growth, it has helped my reports, the team, and me.

It’s important to remember though that a coach isn’t
passive. The best coach really is like a counselor. The best counselors don’t
just ask, “What would you do?” They also provide clear insights and
recommendations. But they recognize the need for the person being counseled to
internalize lessons, and that’s only possible if they truly understand the
lessons themselves. Your telling someone what to do won’t help, but you can
guide.

I like to set up a specific coaching plan and work toward it
every month—setting up regular sessions and helping my reports grow. Many times
employees grow to a point that they no longer fit in my group. That’s not only
okay, that is the best result possible. I spend a lot of time helping my
employees grow. Even though it takes my time and often costs money, it always
helps the team and the company as a whole. As employees grow in their skills,
they perform better, make a larger impact, and in fact, make you look good,
too. It’s worth everyone’s efforts. By trying to hold onto employees, we stunt
their growth. That is not beneficial to them, the company, your group, or to
you.

As good managers grow through the ranks, they realize
employees are not really their employees. They are the company’s employees, and
they are their own people with their own career aspirations. Don’t keep
employees in your group just because they’re good. If you agree to work with
employees to set and achieve goals, they are growing and getting better at
their jobs. They are also setting a good example for others to work hard and
grow, which has a positive effect.

I even push my employees to grow. I find out where they want
to grow, validate that, and set goals. We then add these goals to their annual
performance reviews, and if they do not achieve their targets, I have a
conversation with them about it. I take employee growth seriously and make
employees take it seriously as well. I support their taking training courses,
even if they are costly, and connect them with others who can mentor them.

Now, not only do I support my employees’ potentially growing
out of my group, I explicitly facilitate that. “What?” you say. Yes. I ask them
not just what the next step in their career is, but what their next step is
after that. What’s their second step? My friend and a great leader, Devin Jones, taught me this. The goal is
more than just to make sure they’re clear on their career aspirations, but to
ensure they know I am dedicated to their success. And when it’s time, I help
them find a new role that will get them to that second position they’re looking
for. This isn’t altruistic. It’s selfish. By doing this, I get employees who
are deeply dedicated, who will watch my back as I watch theirs, and who would
jump through a ring of fire to execute well.

Spend More Time with Your Best Employees

“It’s difficult to
not spend as much time with people who clearly need help. But in the end, you get better results by working with those who have the most potential.”

One lesson I learned the hard way was that I needed to spend
more time with my best employees and less time with my poorest performing
employees. That’s hard to do. It’s human nature to focus on improving those who
need it most.

John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems, Inc., pointed out to my
leadership development class that he learned this lesson the hard way. He was a
senior leader of a sales organization at one point and wanted very much for his
poorest performers to improve, to start selling more. His boss pointed out that
he had the wrong idea. If he worked with his poorest performers, they might, in
a good month, increase performance by 10%. But if he spent more of his time
making his best employees the best ever, he could increase performance by 50%
or more. In fact, John pointed out, by changing his focus from the bottom
performers to the top performers, he delivered even better results. I can’t
remember the specifics of his story, but I took this message to heart. In the end, it’s difficult to
not spend as much time with people who clearly need help. But in the end, you
get better results by working with those who have the most potential.

Many People Interview for Their Boss, Not the Job

Honestly, when I consider a new job now, I interview less
for the position than for my new manager. That is, I want a manager who
understands the value of trust, permits me to take risks, and who is, in fact,
a Level V Leader—as Jim Collins defines in Good
to Great. According to this book, Level V Leaders build enduring greatness
through a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will. They
are able to “channel their ego needs away from themselves and into the larger
goal of building a great company.” I am fortunate and completely unembarrassed
to admit that this approach helped me successfully find my current position,
working for a great boss. Truthfully, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

What New Managers Think Versus What They Really Need to Do

What you thought…

What you actually need to do…

Succeed through force of will and personal effort.

Succeed by getting others to execute at a higher level
than they thought possible.

Tell employees what to do.

Ask, listen, and leverage the wisdom of the group. Learn
to facilitate and when to interject guidance and vision.

Exercise your authority.

Facilitate others’ coming up with answers as a team.

Be right.

Listen openly to opposing points of view and assimilate
new information.

Tell employees how to work.

Let employees find their own paths to success.

Demonstrate your abilities.

Facilitate the success of others.

Take credit.

Give credit to your team.

Keep your best employees.

Help your best employees get promoted out of your group.

“Great leaders start by being great managers who inspire and guide their teams to excel.”

Great leaders start by being great managers who inspire and
guide their teams to excel. They are not just superb designers or user researchers. Rather, they can direct entire teams
to produce better results than they ever could have achieved alone. As UX
managers, we begin by focusing internally on our teams—on making sure individuals
develop great designs. But, by truly getting all the best minds in the game, can we generate market-changing
ideas that help promote members of our UX community into positions such as the CEO of a large company? See, that would be inspiring to me. Then, we really would
be design led. It would be inspiring to me if the UX industry became known as a
leadership factory. More about leadership in my next column. Now, I’d like to
hear from you about how you succeeded as a first-time UX manager. What are your
stories?

References

[1] Watkins, Michael. The
First 90 Days. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2003.

[2] Collins, Jim. Good
to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t. New York: HarperCollins, 2001.

5 Comments

Miyon wrote:

The advice provided seems to apply to anyone transitioning from a specialized individual contributor role to a management role, not just UX. What I would like to learn more is how to give my input as a UX manager as much weight, and business relevance, as management in other groups such as software development and finance. You hinted at it in your coaching story and more things like that would be really helpful.

Thanks for this article. It’s very timely. I am a first-time UX manager (first-time anything manager!) and came to the job understanding that I would not do the work any more. I love coaching and facilitating; seeing my team succeed and grow. The hardest part for me right now is managing my time well. I spend a lot more time on management tasks and less on leadership activities, which I see as a problem.

Also, Myion made a good point: Leading my team is one part of the job, but another reality is interfacing with other domain leaders throughout the company. Depending on the organization, that can be rewarding or it can be challenging to break through cultural barriers. User experience may not be thought of yet as a critical success factor for project work, let alone a competitive advantage in the marketplace. So the job becomes one of marketing yourself and your team, building trust outside your team with business and IT partners, being the spokesperson for your team’s vision, increasing your sphere of influence outward and upward, and learning about your audiences. This is the big challenge for me, and I’d love to hear your insights. There’s a trick to building credibility versus crossing the line to intimidating people with one’s expertise: On the one hand, you have to be able to demonstrate knowledge. On the other hand, the words and the message you choose should be appropriate to the audience. I find this is a challenge for me right now.

Miyon—You raise such an important topic that rather than just respond with my insights, I’m going to poll a group of more than 100 UX leaders to solicit their insights and report back in this column in the September time frame. If you want, you can contact me directly, so we can discuss this, but here are my preliminary thoughts: Providing business-relevant contributions is critical, yet often more challenging than it should be. There are several things I do. First, we need to understand the business and how it works, then speak in terms business people understand—financials and business metrics. But perhaps most important is to establish a strong bond of trust with our peers in Product Management and Engineering. Then, instead of just providing design specifications in response to features they present, we can help redefine these features as rich experiences. We can finally also generate new ideas that help move the business forward and work with our peers to jointly drive these ideas. We need to monetize recommendations and be willing to give up ownership. Harry S. Truman once said, approximately, “We can accomplish anything, as long as we don’t worry about who gets the credit.” More soon…

Fine post. Certainly one I can refer back to, and others, too. Reminds me of a quote from Mark Twain: “Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.”

The rise of agile software management further points to the real benefit and utility of teams that are cross-functional, self-organizing, and with members in close proximity for continuous communication, or collaboration, regardless of company hierarchy. One real problem seems to be that companies are still mostly organized according to a traditional—19th century, hierarchical—manufacturing model, so there’s always a higher authority—a non-designer—calling some, or most, shots. (Military language is still used in management training and theory.) Yet, slowly, and not even surely, design is emerging as the real engine of the economy—which bodes well for us, if we’re facilitating a design-first strategy.

I’d say “you need to become a great facilitator” benefits us most when applied to a range of authority positions. Ironically, great management, like great parenting, isn’t really that hard, once we’re committed to it. It is usually easier than the more common type, certainly in the long run. The example set can lead, if not always, to more collaboration, which is indispensable to UX design. None of these ideas are new, really. If disbelieving, read In Search of Excellence, by Tom Peters.

This is even better than your last article. Thanks for your contribution. I think this type of article will make a difference and inspire people to become fantastic managers. I agree that being a great manager is most about who you are being in relationship with others and less about any particular strategies. The strategies that you offer will develop the humanity of the manager and emotional intelligence, which is great not just in business, but can hugely impact the larger community. You are contributing to peace on the planet. Keep on writing.